Teaching to Kill

 Mike Gold's posthumous reputation has not done well. If he is remembered for anything these days, it is for being the epitome of the Stalinist literary hack—someone who submitted his contemporaries not to the bar of artistic judgment, but to the standards of Soviet propaganda. It was Gold who penned all those hysterical Daily Worker columns in which this or that modernist poet was accused of being a "reactionary tool of the capitalists" or a "sentimental bourgeois fantasist," etc. Such at least was the impression that had come down to me. Gold is the target, for instance, of an outstanding satirical poem by E.E. Cummings, "Ballad of an Intellectual," which convincingly and devastatingly accuses him of savaging his contemporaries mostly just to cover up for the fact that he lacked any real talent himself.

But it turns out Gold did write at least one beautiful and human book: his first and only novel—a thinly-veiled autobiography about growing up as the child of Hungarian immigrants in New York's Lower East Side at the dawn of the twentieth century: Jews Without Money. When all of the maniacal fulminations of 1930s propaganda and counter-propaganda have boiled away, leaving not a trace in historical recollection, this book still stands as a moving testament—probably because, for once, Gold wasn't trying to talk about more than he knew. Instead, he was writing about his own life and neighborhood—focusing on his "home town" and "home folks"—as Langston Hughes once advised every aspiring writer to do (by using reverse psychology). The book was therefore a bestseller—and one can still see why, today. 

Among many other things, the novel reinforced for me what is perhaps a banal insight: namely, that the patterns of immigration and nativism keep repeating themselves in American history. Such an observation has become trite, as I say—but the novel made it especially vivid again, by showing us how arguments over immigration played out in Gold's day, and how similar they sound to our own. At the time, the Ku Klux Klan was organizing throughout the country to suspend immigration. Recently-arrived newcomers from Italy and Eastern Europe were accused of introducing crime and violence to the streets of America. As a certain presidential candidate and former president might put it: "They're bringing crime; they're bringing drugs; they're rapists; they're killers..." The Ku Kluxers would have agreed. 

Gold in several passages tackles this falsehood head-on. While he acknowledges that organized crime proliferated in the big cities of the American northeast, he denies that it was imported by immigrants. Instead, he maintains, it was homegrown. The gangs came about because of the need for self-defense on the part of people suddenly hurled from a millennia-old rural existence in Europe into a teeming welter of ethnically-divided urban life. "One had to join a gang in self-protection," he writes. "Ku Klux moralizers say the gangster system is not American," he adds elsewhere. "They say it was brought here by 'low-class' European immigrants. What nonsense! There never were any Jewish gangsters in Europe. [...] But it is America that has taught the sons of tubercular Jewish tailors how to kill." 

The same could be said today. As much as Trump likes to score demagogic cheap shots by pointing to Central American gangs like MS-13—adducing them to support his claim that asylum-seekers are "bringing crime"—the reality is that these gangs are a U.S., not a Central American, phenomenon. MS-13 was, in fact, founded in Los Angeles, not abroad. In the 1980s, U.S.-sponsored civil wars in the region displaced thousands of people. They arrived in U.S. cities that already had an entrenched gang culture, and the recent arrivals had no choice but to band together in "self-protection," just as Gold describes. It was only in the '90s that a wave of U.S. deportations exported this gang back to Central America. Thus, it could rightly be said that it was America, not their native country, that taught these men to kill. 

This is the deepest irony of Trump's attempt to smear immigrants with the brush of criminality. Not only does he traffic in cruel stereotypes that lump the innocent together with the guilty—he also shows his ignorance of where the gangs came from in the first place. They were made in the U.S.A. They were a foreseeable byproduct of supporting repressive governments in Central America, then deporting thousands of people with criminal histories to countries that had just barely managed to escape from a decade of civil war. The United States created the very criminals that it now uses to stigmatize an entire category of innocent people and to justify still more deportations. As Thomas More once wrote, in Utopia: "what else is to be concluded from this but that you first make thieves and then punish them?" (Miller trans.) 

Someday, this will all seem as obvious to us as Mike Gold's point about early twentieth century immigration does now. Surely, no one reading his novel today would agree with the Ku Kluxers that there is something innate about Jewish or Italian or Polish immigrants that makes them criminals. Yet, so many Americans take it entirely at face value when Trump repeats the same smear, in effect, about Central Americans and Mexicans and Haitians and Chinese immigrants. As Mike Gold would aptly retort: "What nonsense!" The crime was already here in our cities. The Mexican drug cartels are sustained because of Americans' appetite for drugs and willingness to pay. The Central American gangs are a U.S. export to the countries of the Global South. We are the ones who "taught" innocent people "to kill." 

None of this is even to mention the fact that—in spite of all these disadvantages—immigrant communities (including undocumented ones and asylum-seekers) are still less likely, statistically, to commit crimes than native-born citizens, and increased immigration correlates with lower, not higher, crime rates. Even if this were not true, after all, Gold's point would still stand. The country should not put people in such desperate circumstances in the first place that they resort to forming gangs of young men in order to survive. The nativists of Gold's day were wrong not to see the hand of their own country in these foreseeable consequences of social injustice and deprivation. And the nativists of our day—walking in the shoes of the "Ku Klux moralists"—will appear just as obviously wrong to people generations hence.